UofW Law Speaker Series: Patent Quality; Does one-size-fit-all?

 Low-quality patents have become a concern for many jurisdictions including the USA, Europe and more recently Canada. The legal discussions about patent quality usually consider either changes in law, both, substantive and procedural; and making administrative policies to ensure quality patents in a system. Though, defining patent quality is no easy task. Multiple factors, including stakeholders’ interest, technology type, and purpose of the study may influence how patent quality is defined. Nonetheless, patent offices around the world, including the European Patent Office (EPO) have taken many initiatives, both, legal and administrative to ensure quality of patents. In this lecture, we will discuss the perceptions and definitions of patent quality that differ based on the group of stakeholders (users, applicant, industry, examiners, judges etc.); kind of academicians and experts (lawyers, economists, technical experts, scientists, marketing experts etc.) defining it. Thereafter, the larger the number of legitimate stakeholders, the more perspectives and so the greater the difficulty in formulating a ‘one size fit all’ definition of patent quality or the more indicators need to be considered. The major risk is that these perspectives may not always be complementary or supplementary to each other. Hence, we will discover how can ‘patent quality’ be possibly conceptualized for the purpose of sound policy making. Further, the lecture will touch upon some of the measures that the EPO and CIOP have taken to tackle the issue of patent quality.

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